In the modern workplace we hear a lot about quiet quitting, burnout, or people simply feeling overwhelmed. Burnout is a concept that means many things to different people. As I’ve been researching burnout and related issues and talking to people who have varying degrees of symptoms of burnout, I’m convinced that privacy teams are uniquely undermined by various manifestations of what is broadly called “burnout.” I think there are about 10 dimensions of burnout, which can compound together or exist independently of each other.
“Burnout” is a widely used, and possibly overused, term. Some articles say it needs to be defined precisely. Some say it is so overused as to have become meaningless. I’ll use it here in a broad sense, to refer to the range of behaviors described as checking out, phoning it in, quiet quitting, etc. as well as burning out in the more generally understood sense of being worn down, nearly unable to continue. One of the leading scholars on burnout over the years has been Christina Maslach. As noted in Jonathan Malesic’s The End of Burnout (p.20) Maslach identified three dimensions of burnout. First was exhaustion, the idea of being worn out. Second was a sense of cynicism. This is common among teachers, health care workers, and the like who start to see their cases not as people but more like numbers. Finally, there is a feeling of ineffectiveness, that nothing they do really matters.
Reflecting on privacy work, I think those three dimensions are good jumping off points for identifying dimensions of burnout for privacy pros. I’m not saying I’ve found all of them, and there is some nuance below. Unmotivated people and teams come in many varieties.
In most cases, there are specific things that leaders can do to help get the most out of their teams and to ensure the better ongoing collaboration, morale, and mental health of their teams. In the end, good strategic planning and clear communications are hedges against burnout. Leaders developing empathy for the different manifestations of burnout will ultimately become better leaders and better understand what’s going on with their people. Addressing these issues with privacy teams will ultimately allow privacy leaders to understand their team’s motivation, and create a flywheel of effectiveness, collaboration, and improved morale.
Exhaustion. One element of burnout is simply that people are tired. Worn out. Exhausted. And the remedy is self-care. Learning to breathe. Learning to go home on time and not take work home with you. There are anxieties associated with being in the privacy business and privacy professionals must learn to be able to set those anxieties aside and be present with their family or the other things that they do to rejuvenate and recharge. And it can’t be techniques imposed by the org; then it’s just another task. The self-care must be driven by the employee, and the org’s role is to give them permission and space. Exhaustion by itself can be addressed. It’s a much harder problem paired with other dimensions of burnout.
Overwhelmed. People in the privacy space often simply feel overwhelmed by the inundation of work. There are new privacy laws springing up all the time, new legislative drafts and proposals to review, new regulatory guidance. New technologies like AI are hard to keep up with. Most privacy teams simply do not have the time or the resources to keep up with the work. Improved and consistent prioritization is one partial remedy. But think of how the Dutch deal with all that water. Or think of how any city that’s grappling with sea level rise is figuring out what to do with all that water. At the Wharf in DC for example, they took many steps to acknowledge the reality that the floodwaters could rise substantially. They built farther back from the water, they built about 18 inches higher, they put the fish market on barges to rise and fall with the water level. They increased permeability by 30%. That means that they increased places for water to be absorbed rather than run off on hard surfaces. They added plantings on rooftops and in small parks, and more trees, all to allow the water to be absorbed. And where does it go? Into a 600,000 gallon cistern underneath The Wharf where the water is reused for toilet flushing, watering plants, that sort of thing. They figured out how to channel the water and turn it into something useful. What new ways can you think of where you work to channel the workflow, absorb more and perhaps repurpose efforts, or build new processes or institutions differently to accommodate inundation?
Distraction. In addition to inundation there is another manifestation of feeling overwhelmed: distraction. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus book is eloquent about the different ways that our capacity to pay attention is undermined. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxiety Generation musters tremendous amounts of data showing how children are being undermined in their ability to stay focused on things because of phones and the nature of distraction. Individuals in your organization who are trying to focus are probably distracted by their devices, whether they’re at work or at home. But what about when they are at work? Are all the meetings necessary? Are they effective? Are there administrative tasks that are taking time and interrupting the capacity of your team members to attain flow? Is there too much “work about work” that is simply distracting your team members from the core substantive tasks on which they need to prioritize and focus?
Cynical. As noted above, this is a big one among health care workers, first responders, social workers. People start to think their work doesn’t matter and is disconnected from deeper meaning. This is where quiet quitting starts — when people think that things won’t change.
Not Effective. Another big one among first responders, health care workers, teachers, and law enforcement. And for privacy professionals who can’t seem to get their organizations to do what is needed, feeling ineffective can set in. The workload is such that you simply don’t have the time and the resources to keep up and you’ll feel overwhelmed and ineffective. But a key element of feeling ineffective is feeling frustrated. Blocked. Spending too much time overcoming internal obstacles. Many workplaces are absolutely undone by this dynamic. It is akin to the distraction notion above, and to cynicism. Such frustrations cause people eventually to just simply throw up their hands and stop caring because their best efforts will not permit them to function in a way that feels meaningful or good to them.
One manifestation of such frustration is micromanagement, the taking away of autonomy. This is a fascinating and rich area about getting into the difference between competitive “cultures of genius” versus collaborative “cultures of growth”; fixed mindset versus growth mindset. Simply put, people will function better when they are not micromanaged, when they are provided clarity about their tasks and are trusted to go about doing them and get them done. They will get very frustrated when they are micromanaged. A tragic flaw of privacy regulation is that it legally mandates “work about work.” The challenge for privacy leaders is calibrating their oversight level to the task relevant maturity and enthusiasm of the team member.
It’s possible for people to be tired and burnt out but still feel effective and not cynical. People can feel overwhelmed but not necessarily tired, still engaged in what they’re doing because it’s important to them. Yet distraction, frustration, and obstacles will eventually contribute to the cynicism that is so pernicious and to that feeling of being ineffective. All of these things can exist or not in the presence of yet another manifestation of burnout: a clash of values.
Values Clash. This one is big for privacy professionals because many people got into the privacy business because of a commitment to privacy as a value that is important to them. Perhaps they think of privacy as a human right, or as an essential civil liberty. But depending on where they work, they may well work at a company that is pitting privacy as a value against revenue and growth as a value. This is the typical tension that privacy professionals in the private sector face, but for many people it can be corrosive. The constant rationalizing within oneself can wear on a privacy professional whether they are tired or overwhelmed or feeling effective or not they can quickly become cynical because they feel like they are compromising their values.
Meaning. People need a sense of meaning. Simon Sinek calls it the “Big Why.” Notions of purpose don’t have to be some big abstract notion of protecting people or promoting greater privacy protection (though it can’t hurt. It can be as basic as providing for their families. It can be as simple as seeking to be supportive of the other people on their team. Consider the movie Saving Private Ryan. At one point the Tom Hanks character rather frustratedly says that he doesn’t care about Ryan. But if finding Ryan means that he can go back home to his wife, then that’s his mission. He has narrowed the mission down to one thing that gets him something else that’s important to him. I’ve not served in the military myself, but in my reading about military history I know that soldiers don’t fight for big ideas or for democracy or for religion. They might think they do at the outset but when the weapons are engaged, they fight for each other. They fight to protect their comrades in their unit, and they find courage in that connection. At some level the camaraderie of your team is based on working together against this greater foe: inundation, feeling overwhelmed, burnout. Privacy professionals can find meaning in working together.
But meaning need not be limited to teams supporting each other. Good leaders effectively convey the larger purpose of the work their teams do. Communication and clarity – reinforced over and over – can build a sense of greater purpose to motivate teams.
Good strategic planning can help mitigate these dimensions of burnout. Planning contributes to systematic prioritization which can reduce workloads by reassuring people that they do not have to do everything. Good strategic planning can provide the clarity about goals and why teams are doing what they’re doing that can infuse meaning for some of the people on the team. The creation of clarity reduces anxiety and swirl, which will reduce frustration. Clarity will reduce unnecessary meetings and will reduce “work about work” that will reduce frustration that will enable your team to move forward. The creation of clarity will allow your team to understand how it is making progress and how it will be evaluated and how it can effectively talk about and communicate what it is doing.
There are these 10 and possibly more dimensions of “burnout.” Privacy leaders can learn to recognize the many dimensions of burnout and recognize the potential remedies. This will enable them to better empathize with their teams and individual team members. Better empathy makes better leaders. Better empathy acknowledges that these feelings of burnout – cynicism, feeling overwhelmed, quiet quitting, phoning it in, not really caring about whether the company succeeds or whether it’s compliant — vary from day-to-day. Privacy leaders need to recognize them and move quickly to counteract. Teams can be fragile. Any one of the above elements can take hold and take hold quickly, like a mold or an infection. It takes constant awareness and effort to offset. That is hard work for privacy leaders, and it asks more of them when they may be struggling themselves. But privacy teams can be appropriately nurtured and continue to be able to take on the work they need to do.